Krasnova’s research has led her to define what she calls an “envy spiral” peculiar to social media. “If you see beautiful photos of your friend on Instagram,” she says, “one way to compensate is to self-present with even better photos, and then your friend sees your photos and posts even better photos, and so on. Self-promotion triggers more self-promotion, and the world on social media gets further and further from reality.”

William Le Queux was a popular novelist in the early part of the twentieth century. He was half French, half British and he wrote books with wonderful titles like Strange Tales of a Nihilist.

Le Queux had started off as a journalist on the Daily Mail - but then had travelled around Europe getting to know lots of famous and infamous people. But as he did so he became convinced that many of the European countries, but most of all Germany, envied Britain and wanted to get their hands on the wealth of the Empire.

The trouble was that the British people didn't realise this. So Le Queux set out to warn them - above all by telling them that the Germans were sending spies to Britain to prepare for an invasion.

But the ruling classes in Britain laughed at Le Queux. They said it was just fiction - which it was. Plus he wasn't really British and he hadn't been to a proper school, he was far too vulgar and insistent in his patriotism. In short he was a bore.

So Le Queux did what anyone in their right mind would do in such a situation. He turned to the Daily Mail.

He wrote a gripping account of a future German invasion of Britain and took it to Lord Northcliffe who ran the Mail. It was called "The Invasion of 1910" and it described how the Germans landed in East Anglia and marched on London.

Northcliffe loved it - but the Mail's circulation department said that many of the towns on Le Queux's invasion route didn't have many actual or potential Daily Mail readers in them.

So Lord Northcliffe changed the route of the invasion to make sure that all the towns that were sacked and pillaged had lots of Daily Mail readers. Here is the map of the invasion as agreed with the circulation department.

The serialisation was an enormous success. The prime minister got up in the House of Commons and said Le Queux was "a pernicious scaremonger" and that the story was "calculated to alarm the more ignorant public opinion at home."

Then things started getting out of control. Thousands of Daily Mail readers sent Le Queux letters telling him that they had spotted people acting suspiciously - which meant they must be German spies.

The letters were mirror images of what Le Queux had written in his books. But rather than making him suspicious, Le Queux decided that this proved that what he had written as fiction must actually be true. There was a gigantic German spy ring in Britain.

Thousands of Daily Mail readers couldn't be wrong.

The man whose job it was to uncover spies in Britain was very excited by all this. he was called Colonel Edmonds. He had a tiny budget and two assistants - and noone on the General Staff bothered with him.

But now Col. Edmonds saw his chance. He teamed up with Le Queux and together they bombarded the Committee for Imperial Defence with the evidence from the Daily Mail readers. Edmonds said that the government should set up a "secret service bureau" to combat the threat.

The head of the Committee - Lord Haldane - said this was ridiculous. But even he couldn't stand against the wave of spy fever that was sweeping the country. He gave in - and MI5 was set up - created in large part by the dreams of a socially excluded novelist, and the paranoid imaginings of the readers of the Daily Mail.

Experts have warned men to keep their swimwear on if swimming in the Øresund channel between Denmark and Sweden after a fisherman discovered a pacu fish - dubbed the “ball cutter” for its habit of attacking male genitalia.

A northern Arizona family that was lost at sea for weeks in an ill-fated attempt to leave the U.S. over what they consider government interference in religion will fly back home Sunday.Hannah Gastonguay said her family was fed up with government control in the U.S. As Christians they don't believe in "abortion, homosexuality, in the state-controlled church," she said.U.S. "churches aren't their own," Gastonguay said, suggesting that government regulation interfered with religious independence.Among other differences, she said they had a problem with being "forced to pay these taxes that pay for abortions we don't agree with."

Just noticed something petty minor. Seeing as they find homosexuality objectionable enough to set sail in search of somewhere in the world it presumably doesn't exist, how do you suppose they pronounce the last syllable/part of their surname?

When asked if he had a message for Snowden, Dog became agitated and began to rant, “Every Dog has its day, but Snowden, your days are numbered. Me and Beth are gonna catch you and bring ya to justice, the American way. If you’re listenin’ slick Eddy, the Dog’s comin’ for ya. You can run, but you can’t hide brah. The Dog has picked up your trail.”

Journalist Oliver Hotham writes to their press officer, identifying himself as a journo and asks a few questions about their beliefs. Standard stuff.They reply with a 'press release' which covers some of the points. Hotham extracts those points, does a blogpost about it. Here is that blogpost. (If you're wondering why that's hosted at Github... read on.)

Straight Pride UK's press officer respond by issuing a DMCA takedown of the piece to Wordpress, on grounds of Hotham having published the contents of their email. Which was, let's not forget, labelled as a press release. Wordpress have no choice, Hotham can't afford to contest it, Hotham pulls the piece. Details of that part of the story are here, in the post Hotham did about the original post.

This, my droogies, is merely preamble.

Today, the story hit Twitter. Straight Pride UK have already thrown further DMCA's at Hotham and have reported his Twitter for abuse because he posted "welcome to the Streisand Effect", are continuing to demand Hotham takes down his blogpost about the blogpost...

To get into the fun: follow @OliverHotham, check out @JackOfKent getting in on the fun and - if you really have to - take a look at @StraightPride themselves. Then wash your hands.